DAY TWELVE: and so, hello — and goodbye.
This post is obscenely late for one reason and one reason only: because content is a mistake.
Some people seem to like making content of their own — art, memes, highlight videos, whatever. As strange as it may be coming from a person who has a whole blog devoted to talking about esports, I am not one of those people. I only make content when I feel like I have to, when there is something I want to see in the world, and it feels like if I wait for someone else to give it to me, I will be waiting forever.
By which I mean, I know I am a person of unusual taste. I know I am unusually drawn to failure, not success, and that that preference is reflected in the players and teams I follow. I know I am idiosyncratic in why I watch esports. I know that my inability to play a MOBA/FPS makes me uniquely unqualified to watch the esports I do.
And I know none of that matters, because I am here and, at least for the present, I’m not leaving.
When I started watching esports, I was a fandom of two people — myself and E. I wrote because creating fan content in a form that could be consumed by someone else, however silly or irrelevant or highly personalized, was the only way I knew how to be a part of a community. I wrote because E. understood that about me and egged me on. I wrote because I had nothing else to offer. I wrote because the esports fan space felt so weird and unlike anything else I’d been in before, dominated by Reddit and analysts on Twitter, and I was trying hard to fit what I knew about being a fan into that space. I wrote because it was February, meanmisterkien had just written The Hai Road, I didn’t realize that Hai had siblings, much less two of them who were both involved in the esports scene, and I was invested in 2017 FlyQuest and hardly knew they were the OG Cloud9, I was skiing with my favorite people in Canada and I was overcome with these threads all around me, of aging and losing your edge and trying to go gracefully into another era of your life, and all those threads converged on one mouthy, self-confident 24-year-old in a white and gold jersey ready to take on some old friends in a video game. I wrote about myself, because no one can fact-check your feelings. And I put the whole damn thing on Tumblr, because it was the only platform still remaining that I knew and understood.
When I say esports content is a mistake, what I really mean is, I didn’t expect to be here two years later, not only still doing this, but doing more of it.
When I say esports content is a mistake, what I really mean is, I frequently have this thought, however unfairly, that if there is content that I am responsible for making, if there is content that I am generating more than anybody else, if someone out there knows me for the content I make, then there has been a mistake in this world. There is someone else out there who should be doing what I do, who could do it better! There is someone else out there with better feelings than me! There is someone else out there who loves Madlife but actually watched his games in 2012! Only they’re, I don’t know, stuck under a collapsed building with no access to the Internet and oh no we need to go rescue them! And quickly, before I’m allowed to write any more sad pieces on KT Rolster!
So you see, I guess what I am really saying is, I’m worried that I’m the mistake. That you made a mistake by reading me or following my work. Which is a stupid thought!
Which brings me to 2019.
I wrote this in 2017, and looking back, I did a terrible job of following through on my own advice:
More than “loss is improve,” failure is a door to other opportunities. It frees us from the prison of thinking we gave up too soon. It closes the path behind us, so that we can’t keep turning back. And it forces us to find what is next, be it the analyst’s desk, the coach’s chair backstage, or, in Hai’s case, right back to where he started.
Here’s to standing at that precipice, seeing the darkness, and vaulting face-forward into that pitch-black unknowing anyway. Here’s to failing as a way of discovering yourself, not in the way defeat helps young players to grow, but in the way losing helps us make peace with our limitations, even our eventual mortality. Here’s to playing for yourself, because you don’t owe anyone anything, not a good game, not a graceful game, not even a mediocre one. Here’s to YellOwStaR who put his own demons to rest. And here’s to Hai, who chased his dream to the end and back again, who stands before us on Sunday not the idealized sports hero but my ideal sports hero.
Contrary to what it may seem like from the outside, two if by c. was not supposed to be a platform in any way to making connections. Applying to be a freelancer for Lolesports was a whim, albeit one I agonized over for days. I almost didn’t do it, and it wasn’t something I fought for. If Kien had said “thanks but no thanks,” I probably would have just shrugged, thinking, of course this isn’t for me. Again, stupid! I am forever grateful that the people around me told me it was a good idea and that Kien took a chance. Which is a reminder to never count yourself out. We will all fail at something. If you never put yourself out there, you’ll never know what you’re bad at.
This post is late also because by the time I knew what I wanted to write, I wanted to wait for cry last and me to put out the first episode of our new podcast, Pod of Ages. I link it not because that podcast is going to replace this Medium; in fact, I hope not, because no one needs to be privy to me running my mouth on air with a first draft of what becomes a feelings diary post. Rather, I hope in 2019, I can keep pushing myself to do new and different things in this space, and Pod of Ages is one of those things. I want to keep improving myself, as a fan, as a reader, as a writer, and as a person who has lots of talented and insightful friends, some of them with their own platforms, some of them without, but all of them with esport stories that no one else has — because every one of us is an esport story that no one else can tell.
Look, I know many of us are here for a good time, not a long time. By which I mean, it’s likely that in a few years I will be in a place in my life that cannot support the amount of time I devote to maintaining esports as a hobby, and with less investment, I will naturally be able to write less or even care less. I know that leagues often die, and that it is possible in a few years the things and people that interested me about League of Legends and Overwatch both will have changed in a way that no longer interests me. In these two years alone, I have seen some of my friends — and writer friends! — fall in or out of love with certain esports. Hell, Heroes of the Storm died on my short watch.
We won’t be here forever. I won’t be here forever. But for the moment, we are both here.
So, here’s to content — yours and mine. Here’s to making the best of it. Here’s to making bigger and better mistakes.
Here’s to us in 2019.
(This post, despite its lateness, is the final part of 12 Days of Esports for 2018.)
